Regime change or stalemate?

This argument has been advanced frequently and shrewdly throughout the Trump era by the left-wing political theorist Corey Robin, who compares our age to the crackup of New Deal-Great Society liberalism in the 1970s, and argues that a lot of the angst over a supposed “crisis of democracy” is really just anxiety over the end of a particular consensus, a particular center — neoliberal-neoconservative, Reaganite-Clintonite-Blairite — that held for a couple of generations but can’t hold anymore.

“And as that happens,” he writes, “what we see is the founding of a new regime and the creation of new norms.” Robin fervently hopes that this regime will be socialist, and it might be — but it might equally well turn out to be some new right-wing form, of the kind suggested by the nationalists of Eastern Europe, the populist grand alliance uneasily ruling Italy (the one Western European country where the extremes have teamed up against the center), and the campaign but not the presidency of Donald Trump.

Or, for that matter, the new political regime might turn out to be more socialist in an increasingly multicultural America and more right-wing-nationalist in a mass-migration-troubled Europe, with the continents drifting apart ideologically instead of imitating each other.